Tracking the Wild

Tracking the Wild is a wildlife social media platform that is an easy way to explore Africa’s parks & reserves, safely share your wildlife sightings and make a valuable contribution to conservation. The platform takes the concept of crowd-sourcing and uses it to collect the valuable data that conservation research needs to protect Africa’s biodiversity.

The goal is to enrich people’s wildlife experiences and raise awareness of Africa’s wilderness through sustainable tourism. Tracking the Wild’s belief is that our worlds wilderness can only be protected when people have the opportunity experience its beauty and contribute towards its preservation.

Tracking the Wild has been specifically built as a platform that the public can safely submit their wildlife sightings without the location data of vulnerable species being made public. This is done by managing what species the public can see within each of the parks/reserves we list. Furthermore, rhino sightings are blocked from the platform and we also withhold the location of any species that is outside of a protected area. By taking this approach, Tracking the Wild provides the public with a platform where they can responsibly share their sightings and simultaneously contribute vast amounts of valuable data to conservation research.

Professor Les Underhill of the Animal Demography Unit at the University of Cape Town explains the value of the app: “Imagine trying to motivate that a species is of conservation concern if you do not have an up-to-date distribution map for the species. Ideally, one would like to have a distribution map that is based on records collected only in the past decade or less. This means that distribution data needs to be updated continuously. This is what this new app helps us to achieve.”

The platform features:
- Live sightings feed with comments, likes and species suggestions
- Personal sightings history and statistics
- Detailed offline maps for each of the listed parks and reserves
- Species checklists for every park (works offline)
- Species guides covering all birds, mammals and reptiles in each park (works offline)
- A directory of Southern African parks and reserves (All South Africas National Parks (SANParks) & most major game/nature reserves in South Africa, Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe)
- In app accommodation booking with SafariNow
- All sightings data sent to researchers at the Animal Demography Unit (ADU) at the University of Cape Town and other conservation partners.